Baba Capra

Monday, September 25, 2017

I read a thread yesterday discussing President U Bum, and it helped a few things crystallize in my mind, like why I've been so down and frustrated and hopeless. John and I see eye-to-eye on most things, with the marked difference that he believes most people are still basically good and decent, and I believe that most if not all people, myself included, are merely lacking the proper motivation to become monsters. He's a day person! So this last almost-year since the election has been a real picnic, as I read more and more awful and infuriating things and become more and more upset, and he goes to work with nice people who most of the time are trying to do the right thing.

We had a heated discussion last night about the level of racism exhibited by a person who instinctively thinks that it's disrespectful to kneel during the national anthem before a sportsball contest, and they don't spend any time trying to figure out why people are kneeling in the first place. John and I are always having these talks, where he tries to get me to consider the upbringing people have had and how that informs their worldview, and I argue that when opportunities abound for people to acquire new information that could inform their worldview in new ways and they steadfastly, obstinately refuse, that I have to call them what they are. We are more than just our choices, but we eventually become our choices.

I'm still kind of chewing on it. Obviously people don't have a lot of say in what goes into their brain for a long time, but at some point, don't we become responsible for what we learn and ignore? And I know I have huge blind spots of my own.

Wednesday, September 6, 2017

I bought a Thai cookbook at the library's book sale last week, and my family is going to be miserable I'm sure, but I'm going to cook my way through it, as soon as the summer food season is over. I don't want to give up a single meal of tomato sandwiches that I don't have to, so I'm thinking October maybe? I also bought "The I Hate to Cookbook" by Peg Bracken because I have heard she is very funny, so it's worth it just for the humorous essays. Also, even though I usually do not hate to cook, I do hate long ingredient lists and complicated cooking methods. I was suspicious about a recipe I saw that calls for canned carrots, yuck, but I think I can figure out substitutes without too much trouble.

Construction on the house has been mostly stalled for weeks, because the windows did not come when they were supposed to. We did get most of the insulation last week, and the sheetrock was delivered, but we can't move forward on any inside work until the windows get here and the inspector takes a look at them and I guess decides that they really are the windows they are supposed to be. But the shingles are going on today, which is very exciting for me, and I think I finally found the green paint that I've been looking for for months now and had concluded existed only in my imagination, and that is even more exciting. It will look like a real, no-fooling house here in a couple of weeks.

Often people, I've seen it especially in Mormondom because that's where I spend my time, blanch at having the federal government be in charge of health care or various other areas because, and this is the quote I hear frequently, "The government that has the power to grant all things has the power to take all things," or "the benevolent hand of government soon becomes the oppressive hand of government." I think that's pretty obviously true, I have no quarrel with these sentiments. And U.S. Mormons have a pretty deep-seated cultural distrust of the federal government, which is also at play here. But our government currently does grant favors and is benevolent--toward the already-rich and powerful. Why is that okay? And if it's not, why aren't people spending more energy trying to dismantle an unjust and immoral system, instead of blocking any attempt to balance the scales?

Friday, September 1, 2017

I'm trying something new for my errand-running today--I'm headed out to buy some paint and I'm taking along the book I'm currently reading (Cannery Row) and I'll try reading that while I'm standing in the checkout line instead of reading the increasingly infuriating news.

I plan to wear a uniform wardrobe of caftans when I get to the right age--I'm not sure what that age is, but I am confident I will know when the time arrives. I hesitate to tell anyone because I don't want anyone to jack my style, but also I want to be a good citizen who gives to the world more than she takes away, so there you are.

Choosing a paint color for the siding has me completely flummoxed. I hate all the colors of green now, and none of them are quite right. I thought I had found one, but I think I must have bought it in the paint store equivalent of the Room of Requirement, because I haven't been able to find it since, and of course the sample jar is all mixed up with the scores of other sample jars. Today I started my search anew and bought a bunch of sample quarts and painted them right on the plywood on the side of the house, since the siding won't be here until next week. It's helpful to see the color in big swaths like that, with the natural light and shading that it will have in real life. I want to use a nice rich color that looks authentic to a nearly 100-year-old Craftsman, and that is a challenge.

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

The house remodeling continues apace. The insulation is in the walls now and it's interesting what a difference it has already made in the noise level, even though the windows are still gaping holes to the outside, letting flies and wasps in all the time.

I took vicious pleasure in seeing Joel Osteen get thoroughly and rightfully shamed into opening his church to flood evacuees. Locking your doors to the poor and needy and lying about why you're doing it is not a great look for a pastor. It's almost like he cares about money and power and not the gospel of Jesus Christ? So weird...

Today is John's birthday and I've made him an ice cream cake, which is what the weirdos at my house always want, except Ike, who is even more weird and always requests a cake made out of stuffing. I made my own cake for my birthday just so I could have a real cake for a change. I chose carrot cake and it was quite delicious--I made two sheet cakes and layered them because layer cakes are correct. Anyway, back to John's cake--I got bourbon butter pecan for one of the flavors and it is super boozy, and probably the whole cake is ruined now. Bourbon is a rough flavor for me to handle because it's so fruity. Bleh.

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

John and the boys got home on Saturday from their backpacking trip to the Wind Rivers. Willa and I stayed home because I had just been gone for two and a half weeks and I could not be gone another day--I had to go to work and I had to make some house decisions. Also I detest camping, especially the kind of camping where I can't shower for three days and I have to poop in the woods. Camping in the best of circumstances is still terrible, and I always wake up hours before I want to, having to pee, and I lie miserably in my sleeping bag trying to go back to sleep until finally it's urgent and I have to stagger out into the freezing pre-dawn to the nearest outhouse which is never that near and I get dirt all over my feet. Not for me, thanks. But John and the boys had a wonderful time and supposedly it was very beautiful. On their way out they passed thousands of people going up into the basin they were leaving, because it was in the zone of totality for the August 21st total solar eclipse. I guess they should have just stayed a few extra days. But then we wouldn't have been together for the eclipse, and what if the rapture had happened? I would have been so cross.

Saturday, August 19, 2017

We're building on to our house, so it will now be a 1 1/2-story Craftsman instead of a 1-story Craftsman. I feel like it always wanted to be that way, and I've been imagining it and drawing it ever since we moved in almost twelve years ago. Of course it's insanely expensive, but only about half as much as it would be to build a new house of similar size and quality. I was lucky enough to find an architect and a builder who both understood my vision and how important it was to me to preserve the Craftsman identity of my house.

I know it's greedy of me to want a bigger house, and greedier still to spend the kind of money I'm spending to make sure it "looks right." I was conflicted about it for a long time. I might need that money to rehome refugees or hide people from the gestapo, and here I was, making a big old American house like the big old American woman that I am. But unsurprisingly I was able to get over that concern and build my big old house. Yay for self-justification! If hiding people becomes necessary we'll figure something out. As they say somewhere, probably England, cheer up, it may never happen.

In related news, the lawn and garden are thrashed, possibly beyond recovery. We had to put in a new septic system, the flower beds are all squished, my river birch is probably dead, and the lawn hasn't been watered since the beginning of July because there's always wood stacked on it. It's pretty grim, and it's going to be a monumental effort bringing it back. It's okay though, because bindweed has infiltrated the front garden and it's so hard to control that it's probably better just to start over.

I got an email that my trees have shipped--I ordered a bunch of trees that are hard to find around here. They come as little bare root sticks, and I'm just planting them for fun because they were super cheap. If I get a decent ginkgo--or even better, a katsura--out of this experiment, it will be well worth the $35 I spent.

Friday, August 18, 2017

I have a hard time believing this is the country I've grown up in, until I think back on what my country actually is and then it makes sense after all. One of the most frustrating things about being an idealistic American is that when I look honestly at our nation's history I see that we've never really been the country we claim to be. We've had a few shining moments when we did the right thing, when we championed our founding ideals, but it was often either too little too late, or motivated by the wrong reasons.

I've had no desire to post anything on this here blog for a really long time, and the election and its results just made everything worse. I started this blog however many years ago now because I had stopped writing in my journal, and I wanted to get back into the habit, because I do think keeping some kind of record of one's life is important. Record keeping is encouraged in Mormonism--in fact, I'm teaching a lesson about it this Sunday. So I decided that in order to live up to my own ideals and to be a better example for my students I would start writing again. Despite my frustration and embarrassment in the moral failings of my elected leaders, my terror at the direction our country is taking, my dread that we can't actually do anything to stop the rising tide of chaos, and my nihilist impulse to just sit back and let the animals and the intelligent machines band together and obliterate us all--despite all of these roiling emotions--I will do better. I will write and record what I can and maybe I'll end up chronicling the final, deserved total annihilation of humanity.